Could the Higgs Boson Travel Back in Time?

The Hadron Collider's superconducting solenoid magnet.

There’s been no shortage of bizarre hypotheses surrounding the Large Hadron Collider located near Geneva, but the New York Times this week publicized the strangest of all. In essence, if the $9 billion collider can actually produce the Higgs boson, it could ….

Well, here’s the way the Times put it:

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

The scientists in question are Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them."

If you’re a fan of science fiction or even of science that’s stranger than fiction, you’ll no doubt be intrigued with what Nielsen and Ninomiya say on the matter.

Click here for the New York Times article.